Tag Archive for UCS

When you hear the term “cloud computing,” Amazon, Google, VMware, and Microsoft are the companies that you most likely think of first. Well, it seems Cisco Systems wants a spot on that list of companies known for their cloud services. Cisco announced in March that it plans to begin offering Cisco Cloud Services to its…

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Days after announcing its converged infrastructure platform, the Active System 800, Dell is already dropping hints about its future development path; confirming its intention to use the tech it acquired with RNA Networks to deliver new storage options.

Dell was in San Francisco last week to host its Enterprise Strategy Update, staking its claim to the x86 top spot with the announcement of its big converged infrastructure platform, the Active System 800.

I have spent a great deal of time lately working with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This computing platform is really quite impressive with its power and flexibility, but my expectations about the platform have really changed since I completed the UCS training. During the training classes that I attended, both the design and install courses emphasized that the Cisco UCS platform would be a collaborative platform that would bring the different groups like Storage, Network, and Server each working their own functional area of responsibility within UCS based on role permissions. That sounded great. The network team can create and trunk the VLANS and the storage team could add the boot targets as well as assign the LUNS. This platform is a true collective effort by all teams right?

Since the introduction of virtualization there has been sheer joy and excitement when having to work with application owners on the amount of resources they will need and not what they really think they want. I have seen all kinds of minimum, maximum, and special recommendation for all kinds of application over the years. In most cases, applications have evolved to be able to thrive in a virtual environment without too many limitations. Now it seems we have to verify which VMware features are fully supported with certain virtualized application also.

It has been just over two years that the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) was announced and released to the world. I wanted to give my feedback on the progress of the platform and how it is fitting into the Cloud Computing space.

When Cisco announced their Unified Computing Platform a couple of years ago, the thinking was not to just design and get into the server business, Cisco’s goal was to and become the heart of the datacenter itself. This was a big move by Cisco considering, that they had a very good working relationship and partnership with HP well, at least until the announcement that Cisco was getting into the server business.

One of the very first questions presented to the Virtualization Architects when planning and designing a new deployment, for as long as I have been working with virtualization technology. To scale up or scale out, that is the question and philosophy that has flip flopped back and forth as the technology itself has improved and functionality increased.

With the announcement of V-Block and Cisco UCS as a major component, is more hypervisor functionality going to end up in hardware? UCS adds some interesting features into the hardware that were traditionally within the purview of the hypervisor. Now it looks like V-Block is the assembly of myriad components that taken as a whole look remarkably like the beginnings of a hardware based hypervisor.